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Archive for the ‘Research & Surveys’ Category

Research and surveys are extremely important to a business. Yet I come across so many people who don’t do any and then try to run a business or implement marketing strategies and wonder why they fail.

Research is extremely useful to help understand your stakeholders, who include prospective customers, existing customers, employees, shareholders, volunteers, and others.

You need this data and intelligence to make sound business and marketing decisions. You need to find out what stakeholders think about you, your organization, brand, products, services, employees, customer service, and much more. This intelligence helps you build upon your successes and improve on your challenges and problem areas.

Even if you have a good understanding of your stakeholder groups and their wants and needs, doing periodic research is important and valuable. It will guide you on what to do and not do, how to do it, what services and products to start or stop offering , what marketing and communications channels and tools to use, provide feedback on your customer services, employee relations, and much more.

In years gone by, doing research meant “asking people how they heard about you” when they were in your store, or asking employees to put feedback in a suggestion box, or hiring an expensive research firm to do a massive survey and/or focus group study. Today, there are so many online tools and technologies available that allow people to do it themselves or hire smaller firms to do the research at far lower costs.

An example of a great technology is Surveymonkey.com, where you can easily develop sophisticated online surveys with a multitude of questions formats and options. It offers many ways to collect responses, and great tools for analyzing and presenting the data. I often suggest to people to set up a survey and leave it run ongoing with periodic analysis of the data. This allows for an initial data collection and review to provide benchmark data, but then provides periodic reviews to check if the feedback changes based on the new business strategies you implemented.

You can guess about what people think about your business leading to guessing about what strategies to use to grow and manage your business…..or you can ask them and make informed decisions to enhance your business – the return on this investment is always positive!

As shown in the example we plan, develop, and manage short and long-term online surveys and research to gather valuable information for your business decision-making. But, we do it for a fraction of the cost that the big research firms can do it for, and our methodologies and interpretations of the findings are scientifically valid and accurate.

You can guess about what people think about your business or you can ask them and make smart decisions to enhance your business – the return on this investment is always positive!

Contact us to learn how inexpensive and valuable online surveys and research can be.